Gas turbines are continuously being modified to provide increased efficiency and performance. These modifications include the ability to operate at higher temperatures and under harsher conditions, which often requires material modifications and/or coatings to protect components from such temperatures and conditions. As more modifications are introduced, additional challenges are realized.
One modification to increase performance and efficiency involves forming gas turbine components, such as, but not limited to, airfoils, buckets (blades), nozzles (vanes), shrouds, combustor liners, and heat shields from CMC. However, CMC components may be more susceptible to bending stresses and deformation than other structural materials such as superalloys.
Additionally, CMC is expensive, and paring sheets of CMC material to a required shape for a particular apparatus may produce significant amounts of CMC scrap. In addition, the paring process may introduce defects into the ply, and may require multiple paring steps to achieve a sufficiently precise conformation.